Idea to Encourage Mentoring and Doing Lower Level Zones
So how do you go about getting players at level cap to group with players at the lower levels and run zones? Mentoring can sometimes be fun but for the most part, it's not doing much progression wise for the player/players that are mentoring. I've got an idea that might help a little:
Idea: Missions For Lower Level Instances That Grant Tokens That Can Be Used To Buy Max Level Shards
1. Add boss kill missions to most of the old instances all the way back to game launch.
2. Add a new token type currency for rewards from these missions. The amount of tokens received should be loosely based on how long it should take to run the instance.
3. Add exchange merchants that will sell existing shards for X amount of tokens. Also add exchange merchants who will sell Velious and future shards for X amount of TSO and SF shards.
4. For each future level cap increase, delay adding the exchange merchants for a few months. This should prevent people hording them while waiting on the next expansion, then converting them all on day one, bypassing the intended progression.
This would let people mentor down and group with lower level players while still working on progressing their own characters.
Further Info:
A few months after each expansion, there are usually groups who are able to mass pull half the zones and trivialize the content. Since this is possible, I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to prevent people from using this new method to get max level shards too fast. Just try to make it slightly slower, but not a LOT slower, to get shards this way.
If this were put in and done right, there would be a bit of incentive to mentor down and run old zones with lower level players. You'd get a bit of AA from the missions themselves plus the tokens that can be used to buy shards. Not the same as what you get from running the max level zones, but still helping to progress your character.
Also, new players could save up the tokens while they level up. When they hit max level, they'd have a head start at the shard items.
Anyway, just a thought. If nothing else, maybe it will spark an idea for the Devs to come up with something even better that accomplishes the same goals.
